I’ve mentioned it a couple times, and even devoted a whole page to a detailed description, but I’m participating in the Conscious Me Pre-Writing Challenge.
It’s all about Writing it Early, which I talked about a couple weeks ago, just as I was getting started. I thought it might be beneficial to you guys, my readers, to know a little bit more about the challenge, and about my experience with it.
Today’s post is more a story than a lecture, but it’s a story rich with writing advice. It harkens back to a creative writing exercise from January, and foreshadows a worthwhile topic for future discussion. It’s also a pretty sweet story, when it comes right down to it.
At some point, we’ve got to move the discussion from, “How do you make a really great sentence?” to “How do you make a really great story?” There’s lots of milestones along that path — descriptions of setting, descriptions of events, compelling dialogs, scenes, chapters, acts, it goes on and on. But before you can really make much progress on any of those intermediate things, you’ve got to understand your ultimate goal — you have to understand exactly what a story is.
You’ve heard it before, in any writing class you’ve ever taken. You’ve heard it from Nathan Bransford and Writer’s Digest and from me. You know it, you’ve always known it, but you’ve never really been able to follow through. Still, the fact remains: if you want to get better at writing, you need to practice writing every day.
Moments ago, I finished mapping out what I have left to do before I have a complete first draft of SHADOWS AFTER MIDNIGHT. Or whatever the working title is.
